It
demonstrates that nobody can govern America from the left, because the country
doesn’t want to go there, and because whenever it has been tried in recent
decades, it has failed. While the elites of the media, academia and the
managerial class can’t seem to absorb this fundamental reality, the American
people know it.

This
reality comes into focus with a review of the country’s history since the
emergence of the Great Depression of 1929-1942. Franklin Roosevelt attacked the
problem from the left, marshaling governmental power as never before and
rolling over traditional views, going back to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew
Jackson, about small government and strict construction of the Constitution.
Many conservative thinkers—for example, in recent years, Amity Shlaes—have
argued that FDR’s policies failed to address the persistent economic
dislocation. But in political terms, Roosevelt was a great success. He spurred
substantial economic growth year after year and demonstrated that, in times
such as those, governing the country from the left was not only acceptable, but
probably necessary. The country loved the guy.

But we
should be mindful of what happened to Roosevelt’s New Deal—the greatest
aggrandizement of governmental power in our history—after his 1936 landslide
reelection and his ill-conceived effort to aggrandize his power further by
“packing” the Supreme Court. The voters concluded that Roosevelt had gone far
enough, and they placed a clamp on his presidency. Republicans picked up eighty
House seats in 1938 and six Senate seats. There was no New Deal reversal, nor
would there be one, because the American people liked the country’s new power
alignments. But further significant governmental expansion now wasn’t in the
cards.

That
was the state of play in American politics through the Republican presidency of
Dwight Eisenhower, who never sought to dismantle the New Deal, because he knew
the voters wouldn’t stand for it. At the same time, he also knew the voters
weren’t looking for any serious expansion.

But the
country faced a huge agenda of unfinished business in the area of civil rights,
and Lyndon Johnson leveraged the civic emotions of the Kennedy assassination to
address that lingering necessity through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965
Voting Rights Act. In the process, he fostered a further expansion in the scope
and reach of the federal government, then extended this expansion further with
his Great Society initiatives to fight poverty, establish Medicare and
Medicaid, and address housing, education and nutrition issues. Again, the
American people generally accepted this expanded governmental role, over the
loud objections of conservatives, but then resisted efforts to expand it
further.

That
has been the state of play in American politics ever since. The great fault
line has been on the question of governmental aggrandizement. And, while there
have been some initiatives along these lines over the years (creation of the
Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and the Education and Energy
departments), the country generally has resisted building upon the New Deal and
Great Society in any serious way. That means little prospect for presidents to
succeed while seeking to govern from the left.

Consider
the history. Jimmy Carter tried to govern from the left—and failed. Bill
Clinton tried it for his first two years—and had his head handed to him in the
1994 midterm elections, when the country gave both houses of Congress to the
Republicans for the first time in more than forty years. At that point, Clinton
brilliantly defaulted to a carefully calibrated governing philosophy designed
to place him just to the left of center. It worked handsomely, and his
presidency generally is considered to have been a success.

Then came Obama, whose grand aim was to achieve historical greatness by building
upon the governmental structures created by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon
Johnson. This was seen in his big economic stimulus program, his Affordable
Care Act, his “cap and trade” energy initiative, his Dodd-Frank bill with its
new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and expansive bureaucratic meddling
into markets, his plans to use the tax code for income redistribution, his
expansion of the country’s regulatory apparatus and his exploitation of
executive powers far beyond anything seen before in any president. His aim was
to establish a new era of big government. As the New York Times’ David Brooks has written, “Capitalism is just a
feeding trough that government can use to fuel its expansion.”

It
didn’t work. It didn’t work in part because the American people never gave him
a mandate for that kind of governmental expansion. This is reflected most
starkly in the way his congressional allies pushed through Congress the Affordable Care Act—by distorting traditional procedures, without collecting a single vote
from the opposition party. Neither Roosevelt, nor Johnson would have dreamed of
embracing such a politically dangerous tack when they sought to take the
country into new territory of governmental expansion. They knew such
initiatives had to be undertaken with a broad national consensus or shouldn’t
be undertaken at all. They mustered the requisite mandates before proceeding.
Obama didn’t.

But, if
Obama’s program didn’t work in political terms, it also didn’t work in
structural terms. The stimulus program didn’t stimulate. Obamacare quickly went awry and has not worked as advertised. The president’s energy
program—particularly his opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline—is widely seen
as stifling economic growth. His redistributionist plans can’t spur growth. His
jobs performance is mediocre at best. His promiscuous use of executive
authority is edging the country toward an unnecessary constitutional crisis.

The
Obama presidency constitutes one of the great missed opportunities in American
political history. He assumed office with an immense reservoir of goodwill at a
time when the country was beset by an economic crisis that rendered voters
highly receptive to bold action. The opposition party was in disarray as a
result of its own failed presidency. Voters were ready for a new direction
based upon a new matrix of political thinking that could foster new coalitions
of citizens weary of the old fights and hungry for a new national coalescence.

No such
national coalescence was possible by building upon the New Deal and Great
Society foundations of old. They may have been right for their time, but they
aren’t right for ours, as the American people have declared this week with emphatic
bluntness. The folks over at MSNBC will never get it, but the next Democratic
president should give it some serious thought.

In the
meantime, while the country can’t be governed from the left, it has to be
governed. And the challenge of new thinking and new coalitions applies to
Republicans as much as it does to Democrats. The voters didn’t turn to the GOP
this week because they have any particular faith in that party. They turned to
the opposition because that’s what they do in our two-party system when they
are grappling with a failed presidency.

And so
the struggle will continue until one party or the other—or perhaps even a new
party—will finally exploit the opportunity born of crisis to lead us out of the
current mess.